Monthly: August, 2011

Ugh! Another comment that I can’t reply to… Don Dude: “Commercial ads are in the way Really cool program , how can anyone enjoy this program when ads are in the way !” Well, Don Dude, that’s what the pro edition is for. It’s exactly what you’re looking for. No ads! HD textures and more!

Following on from yesterday’s post about orreries, I’ve decided to do a quick release with two changes. First, the promised option to disable the click noise. I’ve also turned the volume down on it a bit, when it is enabled. Secondly, rounding out the planets, as defined by science, Solar Explorer now has information about

I had an interesting comment from appear on the Lite edition of Solar Explorer today. “Lovely graphics but not an orrery as motion not realtime and orbits very wrong. Would be better without relative stats, and switch off clicks.” Not an orrery? That was news to me – I didn’t even know what an orrery

I can’t believe that five years ago today, the 24th of August, Pluto was demoted from planet to the category of dwarf planet. Pluto is not a big object, and since it’s discovery in 1930 we’ve found a number of other objects that are of a similar size, or even larger. If Pluto is considered

News recently made the rounds that a Russian outfit called Orbital Technologies had thrown their hat into the ring for giving future civilian astronauts a destination for their journey. It’s a small space station with four “hotel” rooms (aka cupboards), providing accommodation for up to seven guests at a time. Amenities include real water showers

Cassini has to considered to be the quiet achiever of space probes. It left Earth in 1997, arriving at Saturn in 2004. After Huygens touched down on Titan, Cassini has largely been forgotten by the public while superstars like the Voyager twins set new distance and longevity records, and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers discover

In this weeks update, I added a couple of new planet structure definitions for Saturn and Uranus into Solar Explorer. I’d been putting these two off for a while since they have rings and the code I wrote to swap the planet between the cutaway view and normal view couldn’t handle them, so they were

Another update for Solar Explorer, and I’ve been extra busy this time. Apart from a minor fix, I’ve added some more planet structures for Mars and Jupiter and tweaked the update I did last week for low resolution phones. While adding the extra detail to Jupiter, I found out that we really don’t know much